2008 Annual Report Center for Language and Cognition Groningen Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen 2 Contents Foreword 5 Part One 1 Introduction 9 1.1 Institutional Embedding 9 1.2 Profile 9 2 CLCG in 2008 10 2.1 Structure 10 2.2 Director, Advisory Board, Coordinators 10 2.3 Assessment 11 2.4 Staffing 11 2.5 Finances: Travel and Material costs 12 2.6 Internationalization 12 2.7 Contract Research 13 3 Research Activities 14 3.1 Conferences, Cooperation, and Colloquia 14 3.1.1 TABU-day 2008 14 3.1.2 Groningen conferences 14 3.1.3 Conferences elsewhere 15 3.1.4 Visiting scholars 16 3.1.5 Linguistics Colloquium 17 3.1.6 Other lectures 18 3.2 CLCG-Publications 18 3.3 PhD Training Program 18 3.3.1 Graduate students 21 3.4 Postdocs 21 Part Two 4 Research Groups 25 4.1 Computational Linguistics 25 4.2 Discourse and Communication 39 4.3. Language and Literacy Development Across the Life Span 49 4.4. Language Variation and Language Change 61 4.5. Neurolinguistics 71 4.6. Syntax and Semantics 79 Part Three 5. Research Staff 2008 93 3 4 Foreword The Center for Language and Cognition, Groningen (CLCG) continued its research into 2008, making it an exciting place to work. On behalf of CLCG I am pleased to present the 2008 annual report. Highlights of this year s activities were the following. Five PhD theses were defended: • Starting a Sentence in Dutch: A corpus study of subject- and object-fronting (Gerlof Bouma). • Open your eyes and listen carefully. Auditory and audiovisual speech perception and the McGurk effect in Dutch speakers with and without aphasia (Julia Klitsch). • Restructuring and Infinitival Complements in Dutch (Janneke ter Beek). • Off-line Answer Extraction for Question Answering (Jori Mur). • Automatic Lexico-Semantic Acquisition for Question Answering (Lonneke van der Plas). Twelve new PhD projects started: • four in computational linguistics (two externally funded): on computational modeling of lexical acquisition, on text generation from abstract dependency structures, on corpus based machine translation, and on phylogenetic investigations in language relatedness. • two in syntax and semantics (one externally funded): on word order in early child language, and on using cognitive modeling to study language acquisition. • two in discourse and communication : on language and aging, and on the role of prosody in pronoun resolution: evidence from psycholinguistics and neuroimaging. • three in language and literacy development across the life span: on explaining knowledge change through writing, on the analysis of learnability of picture books and stories for pre- school children, and on L2-acquisition of grammatical gender: role of the L1 and age of acquisition. • one in language variation and change: on regional syntax variation in Moselle- Franconian. Two NWO projects completed their last year: • on automated question answering (Gosse Bouma), • on script analysis tools for the cultural heritage (John Nerbonne). Thirteen NWO projects continued: • on asymmetries in grammar (Hendriks, VICI), • on dependency in universal grammar (Jan-Wouter Zwart), • on language, multilingualism and integration (Kees de Bot and Monika Schmid), • on modeling textual organization (Egg and Redeker), • on linguistic determinants of mutual intelligibility in Scandinavia (Charlotte Gooskens), • on grafting in syntax and on parataxis (Mark de Vries), • on the determinants of dialect differerences (John Nerbonne and Hermann Niebaum), • on the determinants of intelligibility in Flanders and in the Netherlands (John Nerbonne and Charlotte Gooskens), • on activities and interactions in preschools (Kees de Glopper), • on picture books and the social-emotional development of infants (Kees de Glopper), • on learning and interaction with diversity in the classroom (Kees de Glopper), and • on production in Turkish-Dutch aphasia (Roelien Bastiaanse), and • the developmental dyslexia project (Frans Zwarts) entered its tenth year. 5 Seven language resource projects (STEVIN) were active. Three of them ended in 2008: • D-Coi led by Gertjan van Noord on corpus annotation, • Irme led by Gertjan van Noord on lexical affinities, • COREA led by Gosse Bouma on anaphoric resolution. One continued: • LASSY led by Gertjan van Noord on syntactic annotation. Three new projects startet: • DAISY led by Gertjan van Noord on language generation and summarization, • PaCo led by Jörg Tiedemann on machine translation, • DUOMAN led by Gertjan van Noord on sentiment analysis of on-line media content. Three internationally funded projects continued: • one led by John Nerbonne aimed at measuring linguistic differences, funded by the German Volkswagen Foundation (in collaboration with Tübingen and Sofia); • one led by Angeliek van Hout and Bart Hollebrandse aimed at characterizing the structural complexity in language, funded by the European Community (in collaboration with Berlin, Postdam, Manchester and St. Andrews); • and one project entered its last year led by Roelien Bastiaanse aiming at language processing, motor sequencing and working memory in Parkinson’s Disease, funded by the International Parkinson Foundation. CLCG hosted nine visiting scholars, and organized twelve colloquia on a broad range of topics. Eight international scientific meetings were hosted in Groningen, including the traditional Groningen TABU dag, and Groningen researchers were involved in the organization of nineteen other scientific events elsewhere. CLCG completed the funded cooperation with the Ohio State University , San Diego and the University of Massachusetts, and continued cooperation with Tübingen. Prof. dr. ir. John Nerbonne CLCG director Groningen, March 2009 6 Part One 7 8 1 Introduction The Center for Language and Cognition Groningen (CLCG) is a research institute within the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen. It is home to all the linguistic research carried out within this faculty. This report summarizes the institute s activities during 2008. A substantial appendix, including a full list of publications of all CLCG members in 2008, their lectures and other professional activities, may be found on the institute s website, http://www.rug.nl/let/onderzoek/onderzoekinstituten/clcg/ (see the section on “Annual Reports”). 1.1 Institutional Embedding The institute is part of the Faculty of Arts, and all of its members are employed there. Many researchers also participate in Groningen s Center for Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences (BCN), a local interdisciplinary research school that brings together research from five different faculties of the University of Groningen. Many of the CLCG members likewise choose to participate in the national graduate school in Linguistics, LOT (Landelijke Onderzoeksschool Taalwetenschap). One of the major tasks of BCN and LOT is offering training courses to PhD students. Various PhD students attend courses that are organized by BCN and LOT, while some senior researchers teach such courses. CLCG began preparations to participate in the Graduate School for the Humanities in 2009. 1.2 Profile CLCG recognizes special responsibilities in the following four areas: • Linguistic research must work hand in hand with the instructional needs of the faculty, particularly in the modern European languages (Germanic, Romance, Slavic and Finno- Ugric). • CLCG has a special responsibility for Dutch languages and dialects, especially the minority languages spoken in the Northern Netherlands that is to say Frisian and Lower Saxon. The university recognizes this special responsibility. • Applications justify linguistic research (as well as progress in understanding). This is important for developmental linguistics, aphasiology, communications, and computational linguistics. • CLCG is in a unique position to contribute to progress through cooperation with the cognitive neurosciences in Groningen. While this opportunity is concentrated in neurolinguistics, most other CLCG groups have research with neurolinguistic implications, including language development, communication and discourse, and theoretical and computational linguistics. CLCG seeks to meet these responsibilities especially by recruiting appropriate expertise whenever vacancies arise. 9 2 CLCG in 2008 2.1 Structure The Research Staff is listed in the last chapter. In 2008 CLCG consisted of six research groups, organized by subdiscipline: • Computational Linguistics (CL) • Discourse and Communication (DC) • Language and Literacy development across the Life Span (LANSPAN) • Language Variation and Language Change (LVLC) • Neurolinguistics (NL) • Syntax and Semantics (SS) Dr. Alexandra Lenz joined the LVLC group as a Rosalind Franklin fellow. Prof. Tette Hofstra retired in May, and Dr. Markus Egg left in December to assume a chair at the Humboldt University. 2.2 Director, Advisory Board, Coordinators Prof.dr.ir. J. Nerbonne succeeded Prof.dr. G.J. de Haan as director of the Center for Language and Cognition Groningen in 1999 and was reappointed in 2007 for another 4 years. The Advisory Board of the CLCG chose Dr. C.J.W. Zwart as its chair in 2008 as the successor of Prof. dr. C.L.J. de Bot, who gave up his chair to avoid conflicting positions when he became director of BCN. The board advises the director on policy matters and consists of the full professors and the coordinators of the research groups, listed below. Prof.dr. Y.R.M. Bastiaanse Prof dr. C.L.J. de Bot Dr. M. Egg Prof.dr. C.M. de Glopper Prof.dr. G.J. de Haan Prof.dr. C.T. Hasselblatt Prof. dr. J. Hoeksema Prof.dr. T. Hofstra Prof.dr. J.